Morocco’s Imam academy leading the way in combating radical Islam | Your Middle East

Updated May 19, 2016 01:30 PM EDT

Morocco’s Imam academy leading the way in combating radical Islam | Your Middle East

Morocco’s imam training academy, part of its comprehensive strategy to combat violent extremism, is “probably the first organized reaction to the massive fundamentalist tsunami in religious preaching and education”:

[...] As a follow up to this dramatic event, Mohammed VI launched on May 18, 2005 the National Human Development Initiative (INDH), a national solidarity project aimed at empowering the needy and alleviating poverty.

This was followed by a rigorous program of training for Imams (religious preachers) in the conservative and moderate Malekite doctrine and school of thought, and for the first time women were included as clergy and were trained to initiate other women to moderate Islam. They were called mourchidate and have achieved incredible success in counseling women in religious affairs to the extent that many countries copied this experience.

However, the most important achievement in the present monarch’s progressive management of the faith issues is the opening, on March 27, 2015, of Mohammed VI Institute for the Training of Imams, Morchidines and Morchidates, initiated to play a leading role in fighting religious radicalism.

The Imam Academy is, probably, the first organized reaction to the massive fundamentalist tsunami in religious preaching and education. Until now, radical Islam, quite aptly, had the upper hand in religious education, or rather, religious indoctrination, brainwashing the youth in hating anyone standing against their philosophy – especially the West, for its secularism and democracy…[FULL STORY]